Abstract: Past efforts
to convert free workplace parking to charged or cashout have not flourished.
This new scheme begins with $0.25/day charge and $1/day cashout. Charges/cashout
increase over time to $2/$4 as other companies adopt the scheme, addressing
the previous recruiting/retention objection. Trust-based, self-reporting
enables very low-cost implementation, addressing the previous cost
objection. The scheme is marketed to workers as a climate-protecting
measure. Potential U.S. commute VMT savings is 23%, reducing 51.7M tons
CO2/year. Compared to past efforts, this scheme uses a) collective, phased
action to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons, b) simultaneous charge and
cashout, c) trust-based reporting, and d) monetization of saved parking
spaces. A company that voluntarily implements this scheme risks
productivity-reducing internal employee strife between climate protectors
and climate skeptics. To address this objection, a “good cop, bad cop”
strategy is proposed. A state implements a more draconian policy, but allows
companies flexibility to implement this scheme. This policy research is
informed by behavioral psychologists, listserv sounding boards including
transp-tdm, and advocacy to nine large Silicon Valley employers. A web-based
employee survey was developed to understand qualitative issues associated
with the scheme. The survey presented the scheme as a policy debate, with
pros and cons, asking respondents for short essay responses. The 55
responses: a) identified special cases in need of clarification and b)
provided colorful and useful comments from the extreme ends of the response
spectrum.

The proposal was submitted for consideration to a
climate-aware California politician.

This proposal is at various stages with nine prominent,
high-tech Bay Area companies. Our contacts at these companies come from
three different areas: trip reduction staff, facilities management staff, and
"green team" members.

In regards to an employer voluntarily adopting this
scheme, creating internal diviseness between employers who are climate
protectors versus climate skeptics. On Aug 8, SF Chronicle reports
that tech-savvy voters prefer Obama 5-1 over McCain. This provides a sense
that a tech workers are a bit more pro-climate than the general US population.
A substantial minority of these pro-climate workers will still be neutral or
mildly opposed to the charges + cashout scheme, as a) the desire for climate
protection is not a deep inclination, and b) knowledge of the land use =>
climate link is not well-understood. However, pro-climate, anti-scheme
employees are not expected to cause internal strife.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/08/BUKR127DOS.DTL

Scheme Summary:

CO2 from driving will continue to grow
in the U.S., even as average mpg slowly rises (assuming a CAFE increase, a
cleaner fuel mix, and continued high gas prices). The reason is that "vehicle
miles traveled" (VMT) will increase faster than fuel economy increases. 50% of CA CO2 comes from
transportation, so we have to cut VMT. Parking charges reduce VMT more than all
other policy measures combined. The CA Climate
Action Team would love to reduce VMT, but they can only pursue incremental
regulations and voluntary action. Without collective action by corporations to
reduce commuting, we won't hit 2020 CO2 targets.

Past efforts to convert free office
parking to paid parking (or to apply parking cashout) in the U.S. have not
flourished. Past efforts have not spread widely to create a significant shift
away from single occupancy vehicle (SOV) commuting. This proposal differs from
past efforts:

Start with $0.25 per day employee parking
charges and $1.00 per day employee cashout. A cashout is where the
employer pays employees not to park at the office.

Employees are assured that all parking charge
revenue goes to fund cashout.

Charges and cashout increase gradually over
time (to $2.00 and $4.00 per day) as other companies adopt the same program,
ensuring that no Human Resources (HR) recruiting/retention disadvantage is
created. (If Company A and Company B are
competitors, and if A charges $2 for parking and B has free parking, then B
has a "$2 per day" recruiting advantage over A. Hence, both A and B have
to participate for the proposal to work.)

Implement monthly employee reporting via a
trust-based, self-reporting HR web applet (one Bay Area company uses this approach). Incorporate other employer commute benefits into this
monthly reporting (Commuter Check - pre-tax transit passes, private WiFi
express bus service, etc) to ensure that “double benefits” are not provided to
employees. Self-reporting makes implementation very low-cost for employers.
The company reports that 20% of employees are under-collecting the cashout,
validating that company's trust in its employees.

Position “cashout + parking charges” as part
of a comprehensive employer commute reduction program. Educate employees
about the unique behavior-changing/demand-reducing properties of parking
charges (23% commute mode shift is expected). Besides reducing CO2, this
scheme will: a) ease severe parking shortages at some office campuses, b)
create real-estate in-fill opportunities (by permanently reducing cars parked
at offices, this scheme enables smart new in-fill on land that was considered
to be "built out"), and c) motivate cities to reduce parking maximums for new
office development.

Parking spaces take up valuable land.
Employers have to pay for parking space land used by drivers. Employers
save money when workers commute via green alternatives (transit, car/van pool,
bike, walk, and telecommute) that do not require land for cars. Hence,
Bay Area employers provide a hidden $7.59 daily subsidy to SOV commuters (subsidy
calculation). This cashout + charges scheme reduces land
consumption, increasing the economic efficiency of employers. Further,
the current policy of subsidizing SOV commuting harms the environment.

Cities are hard-pressed to meet climate
protection and traffic reduction objectives. Because the cashout +
charges scheme is so very effective compared to other policies, cities should
reward employers that provide leadership on this scheme. "Charging for
parking is the single most effective strategy to encourage people to use
alternatives to the SOV" - Jeff Tumlin, Nelson Nygaard Associates.

Careful effort has been taken to make
this scheme palatable to employers. Past objections have been addressed. By
adding in real-estate benefits, we believe that the financial outcome for
employers will be either positive or neutral. We believe that the majority of
employees will favor this scheme and we will take steps to validate this belief
to employers.

We have spoken to MTC (Bay
Area's Metropolitan Planning Organization) staffers who
are a) in favor of office parking charges, and b) talk about this policy as being
very hard to achieve, but being the "holy grail of VMT reduction." California
State Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams has shown
significant interest in commute alternatives as a way to help meet California
Climate Protection Law (AB32) carbon reduction objectives. She is enthusiastic
about pricing opportunities / trip reduction.

Impact:

Bay Area

CA

USA

2007 population

6,000,000

37,000,000

300,000,000

50% of residents work, 50% in offices

1,500,000

9,250,000

75,000,000

23% office worker parking reduction

345,000

2,127,500

17,250,000

CO2 tons/yr saved (3 per commute shifted)

1,035,000

6,382,500

51,750,000

VMT reduced/yr @ 6,000 mi/commute

2.0B

12.7B

103.5B

acres of parking freed

2,608

16,080

130,378

new land value created @ $3M/acre

$7.8B

$48.2B

$391.1B

Parking Cashout Versus Parking
Charges

A "parking cashout" is where an employer
pays employees not to park at the work place. One Bay Area employer (who
we will call "Employer X") has a severe parking shortage, so pays employees $4
per day to not park. Cashout is a "carrot," a benefit used to motivate
commuting behavior change. Employer X's $4 per day cashout program has
reduced SOV commute mode share from 78% to 74%. Before cashout, Employer X
had 22% green commutes (walk, bus, train, telecommute, carpool, etc). To
implement cashout, Employer had to pay the existing 22% green commuters $4 per
day (out of fairness) before motivating 4% new green commuters. Hence, the
cost per day per new green commute at Employer X is $26 per day (for math, see
"Employer X Cashout Calculation" at the bottom of this paper).
Unfortunately, this is a very ineffective way to reduce SOV commuting.
(For the same budget as cashout, Employer X could fund lease payments so that
each employee could use two hybrid cars.) Some historical, discontinued cashout
programs (from 1995 and before, not in Bay Area) were more effective, but
cashout has rarely been tried in modern, auto-centric, suburban office settings.
The recent findings of Employer X are not encouraging for Bay Area suburban
office cashout. For more details on cashout, see:
http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/parking.htm

"Parking charges" are where employees
have to pay to park at the work place. Charges are a "stick," not a
carrot, changing behavior by penalizing SOV commuting. High parking
charges (combined with good transit and bad auto traffic) in downtown San
Francisco dramatically reduce SOV commuting. SOV commute mode share is
less than 50% in San Francisco, but SOV commute mode share at the Bay Area's 17
large suburban-style office parks (more than 594,000 employees) with free
parking is greater than 80%.

"Irritant theory" of behavior change

There is an intuitive psychological
theory as to why cashout is not very effective. High-paid office workers
ignore small-benefit programs such as $4 per day cashout. This carrot is
not a sufficiently large motivator to cause commuting behavior to change.
Employees will not think about the cashout on a regular basis. We believe
that parking charges will "irritate" SOV commuters. These SOV commuters
will think about the parking charges every day they commute. Eventually this
irritant gnaws at them long enough to cause many to change behavior.
Changing commuting mode choice is a significant decision because of relatively
high barriers to changing away from the convenience of driving alone. This
difficult decision is not a "snap decision" and may require pondering over many
weeks. The same $ value of irritant/stick has a much higher impact
than the same $ value of cashout/carrot. The intuitive theory
is well substantiated from both field results and from "behavioral economics"
research:

A 1989 academic paper ("Parking
Subsidies and Commuter Mode Choice: Assessing the Evidence," by Richard Willson,
Donald Shoup, and Martin Wachs) finds commute carrots are less effective than
sticks: "A program of transit and vanpool subsidies as well as preferential
parking for carpoolers had little effect until [Twentieth Century Corporation in
Los Angeles] raised the price of employee parking from no charge to $30 per
month for solo drivers. Solo driving decreased from 90 to 65 percent after
pricing."

A 1990 academic paper
("Proceedings--Commuter Parking Symposium" by Metro and Association for Commuter
Transportation, Seattle, Washington) found that charges changed behavior where
incentives had not: "CH2M Hill in Bellevue, Washington began charging solo
drivers $40 per month for parking, the amount the company pays the building
owner for parking. All employees receive a $40 per month travel allowance in
their paychecks. Carpoolers park for free. Walkers, cyclists and drop offs keep
the travel allowance. Solo driving declined from 89 percent to 64 percent after
the parking policies were put into place."

Janis Hom, consumer product marketing
expert: "The idea of rewards motivating behavior change is really only a good
theory. When a sufficient pain threshold is reached, then people change. Al
Gore's Inconvenient Truth analogy of the frog being brought to a slow boil is a
colorful analogy. At a moderate heat/pain level, you can slow-cook a frog (I use
chicken stock with cilantro and cayenne). If you turn the heat up high, the frog
jumps out of the pot (a behavior change). $4/day is clearly not a sufficient
reward to significantly change tech worker commute patterns."

From the field of behavioral
economics, there is quite a bit of evidence that potential losses are more
motivating than potential gains. In his book, "The Paradox of Choice,"
Barry Schwartz has a discussion of this "loss aversion" phenomenon. Schwartz
cites research by Kahneman and Tversky demonstrating that, "Losing $100 produces
a feeling of negativity that is more intense than the feelings of elation
produced by a gain" (of $100). See Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The
framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science 185, 1124 - 1131.
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, Values and Frames. American
Psychologist, 39, 341 - 350. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (eds). (2000).
Choices, Values and Frames. New York: Cambridge University Press.

In the book Fostering Sustainable
Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing by Doug
McKenzie-Mohr, page 90 provides a discussion of positive (gain) and negative
(loss) framing: Behavior change "messages which emphasize losses which occur as
a result of inaction are consistently more persuasive than messages that
emphasize savings as a result of taking action." [McKenzie-Mohr references
J. J. Davis, "The effects of message framing on response to environmental
communications," Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 1995, #72, pgs
285-299.]

A layman's guide to economic theory (Logic
of Life by Tim Harford) states that we hate losing a dollar more than we
like finding one.

Our $4/day cashout combined with $2/day charges has not
only a $2/day irritant that will continue to gnaw at SOV commuters over time,
but the dollar benefit for green comuuting versus SOV commuting is $6 per day
($1,380 per year), a significant level of financial motivation that SOV
commuters will think about (rather than ignoring) during this gnawing process.
The 1990 Ch2M Hill example given above achieved 25% mode shift via this combined
carrot/stick approach, with a daily parking charge rate that was close to $2 per
work day.

A price difference for green commutes versus SOV commutes
of $6 has the equivalent motivation of $10/gallon gas. [Calculation: Gas
costs $4 per gallon. Average Bay Area daily, two-way commute is 32 miles.
Assuming cars get 32 mpg, one gallon of gas is used per two-way commute. Hence the
perceived cost of a one-gallon SOV commute is: 1 gallon of gas for $4 +
$6 price difference = $10.]

Will SOV commuters be willing to pay others to be green
and to not drive?

The cashout + charges program transfers money from SOV
commuters to green commuters. Will SOV commuter employees be willing to
pay their co-workers to be green? Here is evidence of some "willingness to
pay for others to be green and/or to reduce congestion:"

Silicon Valley residents passed the Measure A half-cent
sales tax to fund new transit projects, generally these projects are funded
"so that others can take transit." Per capita Measure A sales tax is about $25
per year or $2 per month.

Bay Area residents seem to be comfortable with paying
$4 SOV bridge tolls while carpools pay nothing at those same bridge entrances.

There
are many well-known, sound policies to bring about large-scale climate
protection, the problem is more in getting these policies implemented.Because the politics of “big change” are so difficult, we have to
be on the lookout for “leveraged” political situations that we can
exploit, where there is some “political hunger” that can be molded
towards high-impact results.

The work of the CA Climate
Action team coupled with local city climate protection efforts creates a unique
opportunity to bring about innovative climate protection policies.
Should innovative policies be adopted by Bay Area cities, then there is a
very good chance such policies will spread nationally and beyond. Many cities are
adopting Climate Protection policies and a healthy competition is arising as
cities vie to be the greenest and the most innovative.Thus, there is a political hunger to stand out from other green cities (and
to not issue hollow global warming proclamations).

Many
cities are signing the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection agreement (the
Sierra Club has the portal of signatory cities: http://www.coolcities.us/).Thus, for these cities to be “self-consistent” with their stated
green intentions, they will be pressured to match innovations brought about
in other competing cities. As of June
2008, there
are 124 signatory Cool Cities in California.
The South Bay has a particularly large office market.Palo Alto,
Mountain View, Cupertino,Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Joseare already “cool cities.”
More than 500,000 “free surface
parking” office workers are represented in the South Bay.

Further, tech employers are hungry to be
perceived as the greenest. There are multiple factors behind this.
CEO egos are involved as CEOS compete with executives at other companies
over "green." The NY Times article on Google's regional WiFi commuter
bus system (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/technology/10google.html
) caused executives at other Bay Area companies to quiz their commute
reduction teams about whether there was more that could be done about
commutes. Part of the competition comes from the fact that executives from
one company serve on the boards of other companies, fostering
cross-pollination of green ideas. Human Resources staff at companies
look to company reputation as an advantage in recruiting, and the "most
green" designation assists that reputation.

The Tragedy

There is free parking at every single surface parking space at U.S. offices
(where the following 3 conditions exist: 1) the office has no parking
structure, 2) the office is
not in a central business district, and 3) the office is in an office zone
rather than a university zone.)

If
cashout + charges is cost-effective and high-impact, then why can’t we
bring it about?Because of the Tragedy of the
Commons: (The inability to act in the larger collective interest because of
individual/local counter-incentives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).
If all employers and cities act collectively, then all become better off.
But, there is a "first-mover disadvantage." If a first-mover
implements cashout + charges while other employers do not, then the first
mover is at a disadvantage.

If one city with 5,000 office
surface parking spaces starts charging for parking, then that city becomes
uncompetitive with the rest of the local office market (not to mention the
national market).Thus, cities/employers
need to “jump in together” to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons.(The goal will be to have multiple major U.S. office sub-markets jump in by charging a
small amount, on the assumption that 75% or more of the office market will
still have free parking.The
policy will then spread with a time lag to new markets, and the parking
charges will increase over time.)

An
example of “cities jump in together?”From an anonymous source: Interesting
example in the Twin Cities.This
was always said about changing bars and restaurants to non-smoking.Every time any city council member proposed it, they were shouted
down by people who said, "But people will go somewhere else and all our
businesses will lose out."Then
one December day the city of Bloomington
(largest suburb) passed a smoking ban.The
following month St
Paul did
the same, then Minneapolis
right after.It turns out the
cities
had been in agreement all along about who would go first and who would
follow next.

Nation-wide diffusion strategy

Can we truly get all employers and
cities nationwide to jump in simultaneously? No, but we can start with
small cashout + charges and spread the program over time. Here is one very
hypothetical example of spread:

In this example, 3 companies jump in
during January 2009: Companies A, B, and C. In the graph above, they
provide $1 per day cashout. In the graph below, they are shown also
charging $0.25 per day for parking. Every 6 months, these 3 companies
increase their cashout + charges until the maximums of $4 per day cashout and $2
per day charge are reached. In July 2009, Companies A, B, and C raise
cashout to $2 and charges to $0.50. Also in July 2009, Companies X, Y, and
Z jump-in, as well as some companies from the Irvine, CA job center. This
round jumps in with cashout + charges at the initial level. In January of
2010, more companies jump in: Silicon Valley companies with more than 500
employees and some Washington DC-area employers (Tyson's Corner is a good
candidate area). In July of 2010, CA employers with more than 300
employees jump in. In January of 2011, US employers with more than 300
employees jump in. In July of 2011, smaller CA employers jump in. By being
first movers, Companies A, B, and C have a slight real-estate disadvantage
compared to X, Y, and Z. However, from a Human Resources employee
recruiting standpoint, the balance is not clear. A, B, and C will obtain
the "most green" moniker so will have a recruiting advantage over followers.
Further, we expect A, B, and C to be large companies, primarily concerned about
competition with other large companies. We have structured the spread to
concentrate on motivating other large companies to jump in near the outset, to
reduce competitive concerns.

For a nation-wide diffusion strategy,
some further thoughts on tactics follow:

The first targets should probably be the
200 major suburban US job centers (see Joel Garreau's book, Edge City,
for a good starting list of these job centers). These centers average
about 35,000 jobs each. These job centers typically experience high
real-estate prices. High real-estate prices make the SOV commute subsidy
larger for employers.

One promising strategy to spread cashout
+ charges would be to pay advocacy groups $1 for each new employee covered by
this scheme. Hence, if an employer with 2,000 employees adopts cashout +
charges, the advocacy group would receive $2,000. This would motivate advocates
to persuade larger companies first. There are many suburban job center
Transportation Management Associations in the US, these organizations are
well-positioned to advocate the scheme to employers as they have already
developed relationships with employers. If the $1 per employee
advocacy scheme worked, it would be very cost effective. Over 20 years,
each $1 would produce 13.8 tons CO2 saved

If such an advocacy strategy were
pursued, a central entity could spearhead a nationwide advocacy effort.
The central entity could develop best practice papers, boilerplate agreements,
answer questions, and help lobby employers and cities where necessary.
Some candidate organizations include CUTR (the national Center for Urban
Transportation Research that houses Best Workplaces for Commuters and that hosts
the transp-tdm list serv), ACT (Association for Commuter Transportation), and
ULI (Urban Land Institute). In the Bay Area, central organizations include
SVLG (Silicon Valley Leadership Group), BAC (Bay Area Council), MTC
(Metropolitan Transportation Commission), and VTA (Valley Transit Authority).

This is a "Grandiose" Scheme
(compared to incremental public policy)

By "grandiose," we mean that this scheme
is ambitious and elaborate. Some would suggest that a scheme to reduce CO2 by
51.7 tons per year via collective action and individual behavior change is
delusional. However, we'll argue within this section that a grandiose
commute reduction scheme is necessary to achieve 2020 climate protection
objectives.

Grandiose schemes provide a stark
contrast to U.S. public policymaking at regional and local levels. In the
Bay Area, MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) is responsible for
regional transportation policymaking. Like all U.S. metropolitan planning
organizaitons, MTC's Board favors incremental changes such as: "a new bus system
here, a new grant program there, a pilot program here, raise the gas tax by
$0.05, etc." In 2005, MTC's 2030 long-range Transportation Plan provided an
example of the incremental approach. To accommodate 50% population growth,
MTC's incremental policies and programs resulted in projected 40% VMT growth.
Projected 2030 SOV commute mode share declined incrementally from 71% in 2000 to
68.1% in 2030. The plan represents a sincere effort to make things
slightly less worse than if MTC did nothing. MTC did not acknowledge the obvious
conclusion that 40% VMT growth will make the already-congested Bay Area far
worse off in 2030 than in 2000.

In “How Can Transport Become More
Sustainable?” (3.6MB, pages 54-62,
http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conf/CP37.pdf) Martin Wachs explains
how all U.S. public policymaking is unable to bring about large-scale change.
“In other (non - U.S.) cases, planning models were used, as they have rarely
been in the United States, to 'backcast' rather than to forecast. That is,
certain environmental and travel goals were developed for the target year of the
plan, and the models were used to test alternative policies
and consequently to select policies that would lead to the desired outcomes.”
“Despite such urgings and many revisions to planning regulations included in the
national highway program, progress in reforming the regional transportation
planning process has been limited. We appear to be unable to achieve the
dramatic institutional changes that would be needed to make regional planning
more capable of addressing sustainability.” Hence, U.S. public policymaking is
unable to develop grandiose schemes, but climate protection goals (such as those
for California AB32 for 2020 or Kyoto 2020) require grandiose schemes.

Silicon Valley companies are
able to think grandiosely. Hundreds of business plans are created each
year for ideas claimed to grow from nothing to a multibillion dollar market in
two years. Companies such as Google and eBay regularly develop strategies
to achieve 90% worldwide market share in large markets. Unfortunately, Silicon
Valley companies are not responsible for developing grandiose transportation
schemes. Rather, local regulations may force companies to adopt commute
trip reduction scheme that, for a large company, might only affect 500 workers.
In contrast, the cashout + charges scheme would change the behavior of 17M
workers.

It is not currently the
policy responsibility of companies to cut commuting by 23%, but it is important
to inform the private sector than the public sector is unable to achieve this
level of cuts. If the private sector does not take on the responsibility
act to cut commuting, then 2020 carbon reduction goals will not be met.

There are two "camps" within
the climate movement. Camp 1 has determined that significant
behavior-change-led demand reductions (such as cashout + charges) are required
to meet 2020 targets. Camp 1 members include {California State Climate
Action Team, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Lester Brown, Jared Diamond, Greenbelt
Alliance, Bill Fulton, Robert Cervero, Don Weden, Peter Calthorpe, and Silicon
Valley Leadership Group}. Camp 2 believes that behavior change is too difficult.
Camp 2 members include {Vice President Cheney, James Hansen, Oak Ridge National
Labs, Pew Climate Change Center, Amory Lovins, and many Cool Cities}. Within the
state of California, demand-reduction (Camp 1) has been adopted as state policy.

Backing Camp 1, Urban Land Institute's report,
Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change
states, "the projected 48 percent U.S. increase in the total miles driven
between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and
low-carbon fuels." Please see:
http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/gcindex.html for
a two-page summary with a link to a 14-page executive summary.

To meet AB32 climate goals,
California has formed the Land Use Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (LUSCAT).
LUSCAT has a grandiose, ambitious charter, but has little implementation power.
LUSCAT is only allowed to look at projects/policies yielding 1M ton or greater
annual CO2 reductions. LUSCAT's limitation is that it is only able to
pursue voluntary programs. Conceivably if LUSCAT could regulate, the state could
impose a $6 per parking space per day tax which would reduce commuting by 23% to
help easily meet 2020 target. The cashout + charges scheme follows the
LUSCAT philosophy:

By freeing parking space land
for higher use, the scheme enables in-fill. One of LUSCAT's four main
strategies is in-fill

By creating new in-fill
development opportunities, the in-fill could be used to improve jobs/housing
balance and to increase density. Two of the four primary LUSCAT strategies
are density and jobs/housing balance.

Trust-based Employee Monthly Reporting

To implement parking charges, it is
often necessary to have "access control" at parking lots to track the comings
and goings of parkers for charging purposes. Access control may be
implemented via "a man in a booth controlling an access gate" or via more
automated means. It is not excessively expensive to implement access control
schemes, but, for cashout + charges, it is preferable to keep implementation
costs as low as possible.

One Bay Area company has
pioneered low-cost, trust-based employee cashout monthly reporting. Once a
month, employees fill out a web-based form to record their commuting
and to collect their cashout benefits. With self-reporting by employees, there
is risk that employees could "cheat" and collect more benefit that they deserve.
The company's periodic mode choice / parking count studies have found that
employees under-collect their $4 per day cashout benefit by about 20%.
Hence, for this company, self-reporting appears to work successfully. It is
also interesting to note that eBay built their company around the philosophy
"people are good." Such self-reporting is in-line with the successful eBay
philosophy.

For implementation of cashout + charges,
a company would probably decide that monthly web reporting should not allow
double commuting benefits. For days when a worker commutes via modes where the
company provides some subsidy or funding, the $4 per day cashout would not be
provided.

A hypothetical self-reporting web screen
example is provided below for "Company Y" in San Jose. Company Y
participates in the Commuter Check program, where employees buy transit passes
with pre-tax dollars and Company Y subsidizes transit pass purchases.
Company Y has decided that Commuter Check is a sufficiently large benefit that
the $4 per day cashout will not also be provided on days when employees commute
using Commuter Check. Likewise, Company Y provides an express commute bus
from San Francisco to San Jose for employees, with a company funded cost of $20
per commute per day. The express bus and $4 cashout are also mutually
exclusive. In this example, there are 22 work days in May. The
employee submits the report and Company Y pays this employee $36 ($40 worth of
parking cashout less $4 worth of parking charges). If an employee parks a
car at the office a majority of days, then that employee will owe Company X for
parking charges.

May 2008, 22 working days

Days

$/day

$

comment

Vacation / sick days

1

0

$0

Commuter Check days

7

0

$0

Using pre-tax Caltrain or VTA passes

SF->SJ express bus

2

0

$0

Other green commutes

10

$4

$40

rideshare, telework, bike, walk

Parked car at office

2

($2)

($4)

Did not share a ride

total

22

$36

For the Bay Area company's
self-reporting system, workers can track their parking once a month, or more
frequently. With once-per-month reporting, implementors guess that employees who
vary their commutes may tend to be off by a day in their reporting, with errors
canceling over the course of a year. Many employees spend less than two minutes
per month on their reporting, so the self-reporting system is not burdensome.

Cities
Grant Real-estate Benefit to Virtuous Employers

Discussions with employers
have made it clear that there is no one, single benefit that a major employer's
real-estate department is looking to obtain from a city in exchange for
implementing cashout + charges. Real-estate situations experienced by
different employers vary greatly, influenced partly by the current financial
performance of each company. Some companies wish to expand, some wish to
contract, some have severe parking shortages, some have large parking surpluses,
some own their land and buildings, some lease their land and buildings.

Some employers have such
severe parking shortages that a 23% reduction in parking demand would provide a
huge benefit. For these companies, the value of the daily subsidy for parking a
car at the office is much greater than $7.59. These employers may be less
motivated to negotiate additional benefits from cities.

Some employers would be
very happy to reduce parking demand and in-fill directly on the recovered land.
Others would be happy for new development rights to be created that they could
sell to others. Some employers would find expedited processing by the City's
Planning Department to be of value. Some companies would want to negotiate
for reduced traffic impact fees for their next expansion. Some companies
would ask for tradable rights to reduce impact fees that they could then sell to
third parties.

One can even envision a
"parked car cap and trade system." For a 35,000-job office park, the
number of cars could be capped at current levels. When an employer with
3,000 employees within the office park implemented cashout + charges, new
development credits would be granted to that employer to add new development to
bring the car count back up to the cap. The credits could be traded (sold
for profit) within the office park to landowners interested in in-filling.
The parked car cap would effectively cap real-estate development, only allowing
new development when virtuous employers reduced cars. This is a separate
grandiose scheme with its own name and web page:
http://www.cities21.org/CRIB.htm (Car Reduction In-fill Bonus).

It is largely impossible
for cities to impose schemes such as cashout + charges on existing development,
but cities could readily demand cashout + charges be applied to all new office
development, in exchange for approval of new development and in exchange for
reduced parking maximums (resulting in lower cost development).

At $4 cashout and $2
charge, parking revenue does not completely cover cashout cost. Unless
other benefits are created, a company "loses money" for being virtuous. A
example below calculates cashout cost and parking revenue. For this
example, an additional benefit of $1.35 per green commuter per work day would
break even.

The example below is for a
typical employer with 80% SOV commute mode share in 2008 and 1,000 employees.
Cashout cost and parking revenue under the $4/$2 scheme is calculated for 2012
below. To put this in perspective, in 2008, the employer's annual subsidy to
accommodate parked cars is $1.4M - much, much larger than cashout cost. In
2012 when a 23% commute mode shift is achieved, the potential "car parked
subsidy" savings on the 23% of cars that disappear would be $419,000 (at $7.59
per car parked per day), far in excess of the cashout cost.

CASHOUT COST

employees

1,000

2008: 20% non-parking

200

2012: 43% non-parking

430

work days/yr

240

2012: daily reward/green

$4

2012: cost/yr

($412,800)

PARKING REVENUE

2012: 57% park

570

2012: daily charge

$2

2012: rev/yr

$273,600

ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

HR recruiting advantage

CEO ego benefit

Parking shortage fixed

Real-estate reward from City

Real-estate in-fill benefit

possibly huge

Cities are hard-pressed to meet climate
protection and traffic reduction objectives. Because the cashout + charges
scheme is so very effective compared to other policies, cities should reward
employers that provide leadership on this scheme. Employers' real-estate
departments should ask cities for real-estate rewards. Cities should be as
creative as possible, with staff taking the following perspective: "What
real-estate reward should the city provide if the fate of humanity rested on the
cashout + charges scheme."

Expert
Opinions:

Berkeley
Professor Robert Cervero (author: Transit Metropolis and America’sSuburbanCenters),"Parking
lot laden office parks are one of our biggest blights, but they also
represent our largest opportunity for in-fill development because of their
inefficient use of land."

Peter
Calthorpe (author: The Next American Metropolis) at the Congress for
New Urbanism Conference (CNU XIII), June '05: "We new urbanists didn't
focus on the growth of office parks. This was a huge mistake. We need
powerful strategies for these job centers."

UCLA
Professor Donald Shoup (author: The High Cost of Free Parking) at CNU
XIII. "Parking lots within our office parks represent a 'land bank.'
Office parks can be transformed in ways that few people now envision."

Stu Cohen, Executive Director, Bay Area Transportation and Land
Use Coalition, 6/15/07. Cashout + charges "is an exciting and ambitious
proposal. It fits in well with the big picture, into the regional smart growth
vision blueprint process and with California's 2006 AB32 state climate
protection law. In-fill is good. It is a feasible suggestion, but it will
require a complicated process. The emphasis should be in the South Bay where
the vast expanses of surface parking at offices are. An entity such as MTC
might be able to assist. There will have to be a 'grand agreement,' with MTC,
Bay Area Council, SLVG, cities, and major Silicon Valley employers backing the
proposal. It has been interesting to see South Bay residential projects move
forward at the Hitachi and IBM sites. That is an interesting precedent."

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

QUESTION 1. "I don't foresee our company ever imposing a parking
fee directed towards our employees. We prefer to offer incentives to use
alternative transportation (such as our commuter shuttle service) verses
implementing a system that penalizes employees. For example, recruitment and
employee retention are vital to our success. Telling our employees that they
have to pay for parking would not fly."

[Variation on Question 1 from a second employer] "Charging
is not in keeping with our culture. We have lots of incentives in place."

Answer 1. Most tech companies have offices in major
metropolitan cities where employees pay for parking. There is not a worldwide
free-parking policy for tech workers. Google has a New York City office at 76
Ninth Avenue, eBay has their Stubhub development center at 199 Fremont Street in
San Francisco, Yahoo has 200,000 square feet at 475 Sansome Street in San
Francisco, and Adobe's large San Francisco office is located at 601 Townsend
Street. Parking is an expensive hassle at these sites. At major silicon valley
job sites, the subsidy for each SOV commuter is $7.59 per day or higher.
Well-educated and green-leaning tech workers will understand these facts when
they are explained. This education will lead to their being more open to cashout
+ charges. We believe that the majority of employees will favor cashout +
charges and we will take steps to validate this belief to employers. SOV tech
worker commuters have already shown a willingness to pay for other people to
adopt transportation alternatives. See the examples in the subsection: "Will SOV
commuters be willing to pay others to be green and to not drive?"

Answer 2. As far as the HR recruiting disadvantage of
having your employees pay for parking, we'll have all your competitors also
charge for parking, so there won't be a disadvantage. Every office worker in the
US will pay for parking. So we're addressing the HR recruitment/retention
objection by having all companies hold hands and jump in together (to overcome
the Tragedy of the Commons). Further, if you felt it absolutely necessary, your
company could just give each employee an equivalent pay raise to compensate for
the parking charges. In the 1990 CH2M Hill example above, CH2M Hill
provided a $40 per month raise (a transportation allowance) and charged $40 per
month for parking.

Answer 3: Sticks are much more cost-effective for trip
reduction than carrots. See the section entitled "Parking Cashout Versus
Parking Charges."

Answer 4: We can't meet 2020 CO2 targets without cashout +
charges (or some variation). The fate of humanity rests on your company
working in the collective interest with other leading tech companies. (See
the "Camp 1" discussion in the "Grandiose" Section).

QUESTION 2. Charging for parking is regressive, it impacts
lower-income workers more than higher-income workers.

Answer: A parking charge-only scheme indeed is regressive.
Cashout + charges is progressive. It is not clear to what degree it is
progressive, but cashout + charges create a transfer payment from higher-income
workers to lower-income workers, because lower income workers use commute
alternatives more, so are more likely to collect the cashout reward than
higher-income workers.

QUESTION 3. Not all
companies are equally located to have access to transit or carpooling
opportunities. For some locations, transit options are terrible. Cashout +
charges will harm such companies.

Answer: We agree that office locations are
not equal. Cashout + charges will make the office real-estate market more
efficient, by internalizing the cost of a bad commute location selection that
creates negative commute externalities. Note that the lowest income
workers don't work for major tech employers, they are contract workers working
for a security, maintenance, or food service contractor. These lowest income
workers could be given a different charge/reward scheme, with a lower charge or
higher reward. The lowest income workers aren't the first targets of this
scheme. And off-shift workers might be deserving of special consideration.

The
Mayor's Green Ribbon Task Force (GRTF) on Climate Protection for Palo Alto and Stanford. The GRTF is a volunteer ensemble, and
a variation on this proposal was one of many losing proposals that given
consideration.

The Bay Area Transportation and
Land Use Coalition's "MTC 2009 Regional Transportation Plan Land Use / Climate
Change Working Group

." A
variation on this proposal was one of many losing proposals given consideration.

Cashout + charges targets reduction in the use of
parking spaces, not only reducing traffic and CO2, but enabling smart in-fill.
"Transportation-only pricing policies," such as congestion charging, focus on
reducing traffic and CO2, and are thus less effective than the more cross
disciplinary cashout + charges.

Document is about 5,500 words so far. Berkeley's
Betty Deakin states that we need to develop "customer-centered transportation
solutions," designing solutions to meet customer needs. This document is
an example of an application of silicon valley customer-centered product
management to transportation solutions. A product manager builds a
persuasive argument to "go forward" with a new product, anticipating customer
concerns (in this case we have employers, cities, and employees as the main
customer groups, with lesser customers such as landowners, TMAs, adjacent
residents, and state/regional government), making a strong financial/benefits
case, and explaining the implementation strategy at a sufficient level of
detail to be credible (avoiding "gotchas"). This document is an attempt to
create a persuasive, action-oriented product plan.

Cashout + charges is one of the world's most effective
carbon reduction measures. It is in the same order of CO2 reduction magnitude
as having everyone buy a Prius, at a tiny fraction of the economic cost. And,
it's much faster than "turning over" our national auto fleet.

The innovative July 2002 Moffett Research Park (silicon
valley) Draft Transportation Demand Management Plan (by Nelson Nygaard
Associates,
http://researchpark.arc.nasa.gov/PublicDocs/NRP%20TDM%20Plan%207-10-02.pdf) envisions a phased traffic
reduction approach that will eventually bring about parking charges.
"There will be no free parking on site" during weekdays. At project build-out,
daily parking costs will range between $3.40 and $4.20. The large amount
of development for this site would normally create a large traffic increase.
This would normally require a very expensive road widening to accommodate
the traffic, hence the TDM plan was able to save the project $millions by
implementing innovative TDM. Employers can substitute a cashout program for
parking charges. This project is still in planning, implementation has not
occurred. There will be a mix of academic and
office uses within this Research Park.

An August 21, 2007 (paraphrased) letter from Donald Shoup
to Mary Nichols of CA Air Resources Board (CARB) comments on the potential of
the parking cash out program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California.
"I would like to suggest a promising approach to reducing Greenhouse
Emissions: enforce California's parking cash-out law. This law,
enacted in 1992, requires many employers to offer commuters the option to take
the cash equivalent of any parking subsidy offered. CARB is responsible
for administering the parking cash-out law, but has not attempted to enforce
it. In 2002, CA's Legislative Analyst issued a report on widespread
noncompliance. The Analyst estimated that compliance would reduce VMT by
between 113M and 226M VMT per year. Few employers comply with the law,
or even know about it." (Unfortunately, this 1992 law may only be
applied to a relatively small set of parking spaces where the employer leases
such spaces in a separate arrangement from the building lease.) See
also this October 2006 LA Times article: "California State Law Does Little to
Limit Free Employee Parking,"
http://www.planetizen.com/node/21503

Of course if Peak Oil hits and drives gas prices us to
$10/gallon, then we might not need cashout + charges so much.

Meeting with Prominent Bay Area TDM Consultant,
June 30, 2008

Your
effort to charge employees for parking will fail. An employer’s organizational
cost for big, new initiatives such as parking charges is huge. Employees can
only absorb so much corporate information. Cashout is a complicated-to-explain
concept. Parking charges are a complicated-to-explain concept. Combining both
is complicated further still. The time spent internally communicating this
program (and dealing with objections and questions) will cause delays to other
important corporate messages. There is an opportunity cost associated with a
company engaging on this issue. Messages about a corporate re-org, an
acquisition, or a green solar project will have to be delayed. Your program
will suck up a lot of valuable time by exec staff and HR, don’t think that it
is simple to implement such a program. You should not underestimate the
corporate cost of this program. There may also be fear of an uncontrollable
change in corporate culture.

There’s
no way to get the messaging right. You’re telling 75% of your employees (those
who commute via SOV) that they are bad.

There’s
no benefit to a company for cashout + charges. If this is implemented and a
huge sea of unused parking develops, the city won’t reward the company that
brings this about. But, if a city WOULD allow a company to do something
profitable with their virtuously achieved unused parking, then that would help
the proposal.

Your
proposed employee survey isn’t going to teach you anything. Employees will
lie. They will overstate their future virtuous behavior (per the social
desirability effect).

Even for companies that have buildings
with parking shortages, easier, less-effective TDM can be used to alleviate
the shortage. The shortages can generally be alleviated with just a small
commute mode shift.

We won’t
hit 2020 CO2 goals without parking charges. 50% of CA CO2 is from
transportation, we have to cut VMT. Charges are more effective for reducing
VMT than all other measures combined.

The cost problem with parking cashout is
that you have to grandfather in all the existing green commuters before you
can entice new green commuting. Cashout is a very expensive TDM measure.

Instead,
a state parking regulation is what is needed, and it’s what will work.
Companies won’t adopt cashout + charges. A variation on Vancouver’s 2005
parking tax could work. In a world of potential state climate regulations, a
parking tax could be perceived by businesses as much less burdensome than more
intrusive regulations that would require frequent government monitoring.
Smokestack regulations are perceived as much more burdensome and expensive
than a parking tax. Companies are used to being regulated, so they are easier
to tax than residents or retail stores.

A) be
sure the parking tax is positioned as a VMT/CO2 reducer, not as a revenue
raiser. B) The Vancouver tax caused business to revolt, and business caused
TransLink to be shrunk and to lose power, as well as having the tax
overturned. C) Vancouver’s tax was not attached to a goal of VMT reduction
or climate protection, that hurt the tax. D) The idea would be that a
flexible tax scheme would allow companies to bypass the tax by implementing
parking charges or cashout. Regulation would cause companies to cut employee
commute trips.

Lastly,
CA CEQA makes smart growth illegal. CEQA must be changed to ignore worsened
local intersection traffic congestion. Level of Service F intersections are
good things when smart growth TOD density results. What CEQA needs to measure
is regional VMT impact. See for example this regional workshop: "LOS
Methodologies: Barrier to In-fill"
http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/smartgrowth/technical%20sessions/1/Session%20Materials/SessionNotes.pdf
Jeff Ordway(BART real-estate) “pointed out that lower densities score better
in CEQA and LOS because they are assumed to have a lower environmental
impact.”

Chat with CA State Government staffer, July 2, 2008

The above TDM consultant is right on. Cashout can't be
easily done. And CA's cashout law has limited applicability. We do know that
"new green commute startup incentives" are cost-effective, but cashout where
you have to grandfather all the existing green commuters is not.

To reduce VMT to meet AB32, charging for parking is
key. Yes, if the government could mandate a parking tax or charging for
parking, we could reduce commute VMT to a level that would be in line with
AB32 goals. But, a 10-year-old survey of pricing measures found that parking
charges rated the lowest. Hence, parking charges do not appear to be
politically feasible. Folks think free parking is their god-given right.

And, if employers just started charging for parking,
that would bring us to AB32 VMT goals. It's interesting to hear the argument
that employers will face an internal hornet's nest with employees if employers
propose parking charges. Given the recent gas price rise, it must be that much
harder to convince employees to favor parking charges. It's interesting to
hear the idea that if a company had 90% of employees mildly in favor of
parking charges and 10% strongly opposed, then a company might decline to
pursue parking charges because of a very high cost dealing with the 10% to
that company. Hence, companies may prefer a state mandate to enable parking
charges, as they can't bring about parking charges via an internal political
process with their employees. And the government can't mandate charges because
of voter opposition, so the government would prefer a voluntary, employer-led
program. So both sides wish the other would solve the problem, so there's
really no way to meet AB32 VMT goals.

The federal tax exemption that allows employers to not
pay tax on parking that they subsidize for employees is a perverse incentive.

Be sure that the charge is a daily charge. A monthly
parking pass is worse. Once you have bought a monthly pass, then
parking each day is conceptually free. (The "park or not" trade-off
decision should be apparent each day, in order to "gnaw" at people. This is
similar to the thinking behind auto insurance "pay as you go" proposals.)
Further, a monthly scheme can be perceived as all or nothing ("I can't commit
to not parking every day, I need to park a couple of times per week.")

Pfizer in the UK has a good daily scheme. The
"cost" of parking is $4 per day. Workers use proximity ID cards to access
buildings and gated parking. (Gated parking is a bit of a daily irritant.)
Each employee is given credits each month for a month's worth of parking. Each
access to parking draws down these credits. Unused credits are turned
into $4 per day (via payroll) at Pfizer's Sandwich facility (and $10 per day
at Pfizer's Walton Oaks site with tighter parking requirements). Shoup
explains that carpool riders may swipe at the parking gate, to share the cost
of parking with the driver. See a)
http://eeru.open.ac.uk/staff/marcus/parkingcashout.pdf
(page 2), and b)
http://www.ctc.org.uk/resources/Benchmarking/PFIZERGREENTRAVELPLAN.pdf
. Pfizer has 5,500 employees at their Sandwich in Kent facility.

He finds the proposal interesting and is willing to
meet to see how some local office folks will react to it.

Opinions
from a Bay Area company’s TDM staff, June 19 meeting

Self-reporting for cashout + charges won’t work. Without enforcement, there
will be too much cheating. You have to have some teeth. The current web-based
self-reporting that one Bay Area company has implemented is only for a cashout
/ carrot. When you move to charges / stick, then self-reporting won’t work.
Some workers will rebel against the stick and they will influence others to
further rebel.

As far
as cashout + charges making a NY Times story (to tickle CEO egos), there won’t
be any interest. It’s not a sexy story like Google WiFi express commute
buses.

You
shouldn’t start with $0.25 charges. That’s a joke. Start with $2.

For
cashout + charges, leading with an argument for climate protection will not
work with our company. We have a number of workers who have strong political
opinions.

We
undertook an informal “carrot versus stick” investigation of parking charges
versus incentives at our company, as part of planning for our growing employee
population. We received strong employee pushback about charging for parking.

For the
major employment center in our city, the city’s draft trip reduction plan
included parking charges, but this was removed in the final version.

Complicated
(but solvable) implementation details that will need to be addressed

For office parking located near residential neighborhoods, residential permit
parking may be required to prevent spillover parking.

Cashout + charges proposes web-based monthly self-reporting.
More complicated and more expensive employee parking accounting systems may
also be implemented. These include

David Maymudes suggests "adding use" to FasTrak or EZ-Pass transponders,
using the regional transit agency's credit card billing system and paying
the authority a small percent of revenue for use of their system.
License Plate Recognition systems appear to be getting more accurate and less
expensive.

Carpooling and Vanpooling may be further incentivized via
larger rewards via the monthly self-reporting system. One Bay Area
company has
pioneered larger rewards when they pay drivers $4 for each vanpool or carpool
passenger. At face value, this appears be increase the green commute
payout to employees. However, this reward scheme makes drivers motivated
to arrange ridesharing logistics and to recruit new passengers. This may
end up being less expensive than companies undertaking the work of ridesharing
logistics and less expensive than running private express commute bus service.

Complexities within this document

The mathematical calculations are
purposely simplified, making them within +/- 20% of their actual, accurate
values. There are differences between shifting commute mode and shifting
"cars parked per 100 employees." For example, when commute mode shifts from SOV
to carpooling, the average carpool has an occupancy of 2.2 people, so carpools
still generate cars that park. Tax considerations also need to be
analyzed.

Public policy experts often bristle at the broad
use of "Tragedy of the Commons" to explain inability to act collectively.
Policy experts often prefer to apply the Tragedy of the Commons more narrowly to
the inability to collectively bring about optimal use of a shared, scarce
resource. In cashout + charges, there two shared resources: "healthy
climate" and "developable land." Developable land is scarce. Healthy
climate isn't so much scarce as it is in danger.

Challenges with Complex Policies

Cashout + charges is more complicated that
previous charging/cashout policies. This complicated solution crosses
eight knowledge domains, so is best analyzed in a cross-disciplinary manner. The eight domains are:

Suburban political “realpolitic” for trip
reduction in major employment centers

Public policy. Spreading innovation among
cities. “Large innovation” versus incremental application of best practices.
Tragedy of the Commons.

In “How Can Transport Become More Sustainable?” (http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conf/CP37.pdf
, pages 54-62), Martin Wachs explains the difficulty with complex policy
proposals. “Societies do not do well with
complexity, nor do conference workshops. We need to find a way of reducing our
discussion to manageable components, just as we need to find ways of enacting
policies through manageable steps and workable components. We need to
acknowledge complex relationships among the elements while focusing on them one
at a time. We only seem to be able to enact laws and regulations, to take
actions, and to set priorities one bite at a time.”

Winners & Losers

Winners & Losers

employee:

employee:

govt rev

employer

SOV

non-SOV

mode shift

$6 tax

W

L

L

23%

$6 charge

W

L

23%

$4 cashout

L

W

4%

$2 charge + $4 cashout

L

W

23%

Future Research Work Items

Interview/survey tech employees about
their willingness to allow $2 parking charges + $4 per day cashout (given an
education about the policy objectives)

Pitch the proposal to major employers
and their cities. Record feedback. (Silicon Valley, Irvine, Tysons,
Denver Tech Center, Perimeter Center, Bell-Red, etc). Hold "round table"
meetings where appropriate. Will the diffusion model work? Who will
be first and second movers? What are the real-estate rewards?

For a given employer, create more
detailed financials. Analyze tax implications and optimize the program
accordingly.

Convene an initial, small conference call of
experts and employers to discuss the policy. Take a "vote" to ascertain whether this
policy is worth pursuing in depth.

Develop "an elevator pitch" to explain
the concept to decision makers. Said pitch might become the basis for a
future survey instrument for an employer lobbying organization such as SVLG.

Canvass funders and national
organizations about the nation-wide advocacy strategy.

Develop a prototype web-based monthly
self-reporting applet.

If the real-estate rewards require
Development Agreements, develop one or more Development
Agreements, creating boilerplate language for future agreements

Monitor implementation, measure results,
survey affected constituents

Publish fascinating academic research
papers on the topic

(in the far future) Fund and implement a low-cost,
high-tech parking management automation implementation, with access control, car
counting, and parking charge collection. An RFP should be
developed, with freedom for technological innovation. RFP outreach should
be made to high-tech web companies with proven interest in "green" or
transportation.

Susan Shaheen found that "taking away
things that people already have," such as the "right to free parking," are
extra-difficult, because the impact of having something taken away that you
already have is larger than if the policy was implemented from scratch. It might
be worth exploring and characterizing this barrier to green policies.